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# Don't come with those tales
> @published 2019/05/05, 12:00 {.published}
I love books. I love them so much that I even decide to make
a living from them---probably a very bad career decision. But
I can't idealize that love.
During school and university I was taught that I should love
books. Actually, some teachers made me clear that it was the
only way I could get my bachelor's degree. Because books are
one of the main freedom devices in our shitty world, right? Not
loving books is like the will to stay in a cave---hello, Plato.
Not celebrating its greatness is just one step to support antidemocratic
regimes. And while I was learning to love books, of course I
also learn to respect its “creators,” until I desire to be one
of them.
I don't think it is casual that the development of what we mean
by book is independent from the developments of capitalism and
what we understand by author. Maybe correlation; maybe intersection;
but definetly not separates stories.
Let's start with a common place: the invention of printing. Yeah,
it is an arbitraty and problematic start. We could say that books
and authors goes far before that; therefore, they aren't a product
of what it would became capitalism. But what we have in that
particularly place in history is the standardization and massification
of a practice. It didn't happen from day to night, but little
by little all the methodological and technical diversity became
more homogeneous. And with that, we were able to made books not
as luxury commodities, but as objects of everyday use.
And not just books, but printed text in general. Before the invention
of printing, we could barely see text in our surroundings. What
surprise me about printing it is not the capacity of production
that we reached, but how that technology normalized the existence
of text in our daily basis.
Newspapers first and now social media relies on that normalization
to generate the idea of an “universal” public debate---I don't
know if it is actually “public” if almost all popular newspapers
and social media platforms are own by corporations and its criterias;
but let's pretend it is a minor issue. And public debate supposedly
incentivates democracy.
Before Enlightenment the owners of printed text realized its
freedom potential. Most churchs and kingdoms tried to control
it. The Protestant Church first and then the Enlightment and
emerging capitalist enterprises hijacked the control of public
debate; specifically who owns the means of printed text production,
who decides the languages worthy to print and who sets its main
reader.
Maybe it is a bad analogy but printed text in newspapers, books
and journals were so fascinating like nowadays is digital “content”
over the Internet. But what I mean is that there were many people
who tried to have that control and power. And most of them failed
and keep failing.
So during 18th century books started to have another meaning.
They ceased to be mainly devices of God's word to be _a_ device
of freedom of speech. Thanks to the firsts emerging capitalists
we got means for secular thinking. Acts of censorship became
evident acts of political restriction instead of acts against
sinners.
The invention of printing created so big demand of printed text
that it actually generated the publishing industry. Selfpublishing
to satisfy internal institutional demand openned the place to
an industry for new citizens readers. A luxury and religious
object became a commodity in the “free” market.
While printed text surpassed almost all restrictions, freedom
of speech rised hand-to-hand freedom of enterprise---the debate
between Free Software Movement and Open Source Initiative relies
in an old and more general debate: how much freedom can we grant
in order to secure freedom? But it also developed other freedom
that was fastened by religious or political authorities: the
freedom to be identify as an author.
How we understand authorship in our days depends in the process
where the notion of author became more closed to the idea of
“creator.” And it is actually a very interesting semantic transfer.
_In one way_ the invention of printing mechanized and improved
a practice that it was believed to be done with God's help. Trithemius
got so horrified that printing wasn't welcome. But with new Spirits---freedoms
of enterprise and speech---what was seen even as a demonic invention
became one of the main technologies that still defines and reproduces
the idea of humanity.
This openned the opportunity to independent authors. Printed
text wasn't anymore a matter of God's word or authorities but
a secular and more ephemeral Human's word. The massification
of publishing also openned the gates for less relevant and easy-to-read
printed texts; but for the incipient publishing industry it didn't
matter: it was a way to catch more profits and consumers.
So authors without religious or political authority found a way
to sneak their names in printed text. It wasn't yet a function
of property---I don't like the word “function,” but I will use
it anyways---but a function of attribution: they wanted to publicy
be know as the human who wrote those texts. No God, no authority,
no institution, but a person of flesh and bone.
But that also meant regular powerless people. Without backup
of God or King, who the fucks are you, little peasant? Publishers---aka
printers in those years---took advantage. That is why I did a
very problematic analogy, the fascitation to saw a work printed
with your name is similar to see a Wikipedia article about you.
You don't gain directly anything, only reputation. It relies
on you to made it profitable.
During 18th century, authorship became a function of _individual_
attribution, but not a function of property. So I think that
is were the notion of “creator” came out as an ace in the hole.
In Germany we can track one of the first robust attempts to empower
this new kind of powerless independent author.
German Romanticism developed something that goes back to the
Renaissance: humans can also _create_ things. Sometimes we forget
that Christianity has been also a very messy set of beliefs.
The attempt to made a consistent, uniform and rationalized set
of beliefs goes back in the diversity of religious practices.
So you could accept that printing text lost its directly connection
to God's word while you could argue some kind of indirectly inspiration
beyond our corporeal world. And you don't have to rationalize
it: you can't prove it, you just feel it and know it.
So german writers used that as foundations for independent authorship.
No God's word, no authorship, no institution, but a person inspired
by things beyond our world. The notion of “creation” has a very
strong religious and methaphysical backgrounds that we can't
just ignore them: act of creation means the capacity to bring
to this world something that it didn't belong to it. The relationship
between authorship and text turned out so imminent that even
nowadays we don't have any fucking idea why we accept as common
sense that authors have a superior and inalianeble bond to its
works.
But before the expansionism of German Romanticism notion of author,
writers were seen more as producers that sold their work to the
owners of means of production. So while the invention of printing
facilitated a new kind of secular and indepent author, _in other
hand_ it summoned Authorship Fog: “Whenever you cast another
Book spell, if Spirits of Printing's Invention is in the command
zone or on the battlefield, create a 1/1 white Author creature
token with flying and indestructible.” As material as a printed
card we made magic to grant authors a creative function: the
ability to “produce from nothing.”
Authors as creators is a cool metaphor, who doesn't want to have
some divine powers? In the abstract discussion about the relationship
between authors, texts and freedom of speech, it is just a perfect
fit. You don't have to rely in anything material to grasp all
of them as an unique phenomena. But in the concrete facts of
printed texts and the publishers abuse to authors you go beyond
attribution. You are not just linking an object to a subject.
Instead, you are grating property relationships between an object
and a subject.
And property means nothing if you can't exploit it. At the beging
of publishing industry and during all 18th century, publishers
took advantage of this new kind of “property.” The invention
of the author as a property function was the rise of new legislation.
Germans and French jurists translated this speech to laws.
I won't talk about the history of moral rights. Instead I want
to highlight how this gave a supposedly ethical, political and
legal justification of the individualization of cultural commodities.
Authorship began to be associated inalienably to individuals
and _a_ book started to mean _a_ reader. But not only that, the
possibilities of intelectual freedom were reduced to a particular
device: printed text.
More freedom traslated to the need of more and more printed material.
More freedom implied the requirement of bigger and bigger publishing
industry. More freedom entailed the expansionism of cultural
capitalism. Books switched to commodities and authors became
its owners. Moral rights were never about the freedom of readers,
but who was the owner of that commodities.
Books stopped to be sources of oral and local public debate and
became private devices for an “universal” public debate. Authorship
puts attribution in secondary place so indivudal ownership could
become its synonymous. A book for several readers and an author
as an id for an intellectual movement or institution became irrelevant
against a book as property for a particular reader and author.
And we are sitting here reading all this shit without taking
to account that ones of the main wins of our neoliberal world
is that we have been talking about objects, individuals and production
of wealth. Who the fucks are the subjects who made all this publishing
shit possible? Where the fucks are the communities that in several
ways make possible the rise of authors? For fuck sake, why aren't
we talking about the maintenance of means of production?
We aren't books and we aren't its authors. We aren't those individuals
who everybody are gonna relate to the books we are working on
and, of course, we lack of sense of community. We aren't the
ones who enjoy all that wealth generated by books production
but for sure we are the ones who made all that possible. We are
neglecting ourselves: change my mind.
So don't come with those tales about the greatness of books for
our culture, the need of authorship to transfer wealth or to
give attribution and how important for our lifes is the publishing
production.
* Did you know that books have been mainly devices of ideological
reproduction---most best-selling books aren't critical thinking
books that free our minds, but school books with its hidden
curriculum and selfhelp and erotic books that keep reproducing
basic exploitable stereotypes?
* Did you realize that authorship haven't been the best way
to transfer wealth or give attribution---even now more than
before authors have to paid in order to be published at the
same time that in the practice they lose all rights?
* Did you see how we keep to be worry about production no matter
what---it doesn't matter that it would imply bigger chains
of free labor or, as I prefer to say: chains of explotation
and “intellectual” slavery?
Please, don't come with those tales, we already reached more
fertile fields that can generate way better stories.